


of saviours and shadows

by lonely_is_so_lonely_alone



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 4 + 1 things, Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Budapest, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Pre-Canon, Vormir, What Happened in Budapest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-12 15:19:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19231765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonely_is_so_lonely_alone/pseuds/lonely_is_so_lonely_alone
Summary: Four times that Clint saved Natasha, and one time he didn't.- or, Clint and Nat being badass spies who have each other’s backs.





	of saviours and shadows

The would call it fate, but the two of them aren’t destined to be together. It is forced, violent and bloody. It is the stars being plucked with knives and laid in new positions, all the way across the dark night sky. 

This is how it started. 

The clouds are covering her as she slips down the street, over cobbles in heels that most would consider too high. On alert, hands tight on the gun in her hip holster. She is prepared, ready, almost, for the calm release that will come when she reaches the door on the corner. She steps lightly, as if she is testing new waters. Air is caught in lungs that have steadied themselves over time. This is just mission, but she isn’t just a woman. 

They always said there was something about her, something special. Her childhood, in the shadows of the parents she never knew - picked out and taken to the Red Room. It was whispered for all to hear, made the other girls mad with jealousy and envy. Nat just carried it with her, a burden and a blessing. 

She steps closer to the door. She rests her palm flat on the wood, pushes forward with little momentum. A hand appears from nowhere and crushes her body against the frame. She blinks twice and looks up. A figure stands before her, clutching arrows like play things. 

He has one hand against her throat. She flexes her fists, reaches for her gun, but finds there is a blade pushed against her ribs.  
She looks away because he won’t. She knows who this is - an assassin sent in the night to kill her with quick ease, someone smart and clever and collected. Someone who knew she’d be here on this night, right at this moment. She would say this was how it was always meant to be but she doesn’t believe in that crap. 

‘Come with me,’ he says. She doesn’t not hear this the first time. She is lifting her hands, pressing a gun to his spine, all too aware that any bullet shot through him would rifle through her own chest. He speaks again, his breath harsh and fierce against her cheek. 

Nat says nothing. She launches upwards with all her strength and falls away from his embrace. She throws herself halfway across the room, gun ready, trained on his head, right between his eyes.  
But he doesn’t pace after her. He doesn’t raise a hand, even though she knows he has weapons, even though it would be a better choice to fight. But he is steady, like a heartbeat, constant as the stars she can’t see. 

He shifts on the balls of his feet. He says, ‘Come with me,’ and then a second later, with his arm outstretched, ‘It’s ok, you’re safe.’  
She doesn't believe him for three days. Not as he leads her from the hotel room with their guns deactivated, not as he explains SHIELD and redemption and doing good in the world. Or as they ride in a helicopter over the city, as he explains the ways he tracked her, how she’s the best assassin he’s come across in a decade in his job. 

She doesn’t even believe him as they touch down and he says, ‘I made a different call,’ with eyes that would burn a hole in the sun if they so pleased. 

He saves her, not from the killing, or even really from the Red Room. This time, he saves her from the soullessness of her life. He smiles, puts his arm around her as he introduces her to Nick Fury. He saves her, and in the end it’s what kills her. 

….

They’re in a SHEILD jeep, 50 miles outside Moscow, the snow falling rapidly like a blanket you could give a child. The heaters packed up hours ago, their breaths irregular clouds in their  
vision. 

The mission was simple, a recon, just watching and waiting. The winter is cruel, as is the way with her homeland. She rests her head backwards and looks at him out of the corner of her eye. Clint stares into the middle distance, eyes set. He is a hawk here, more than she has ever seen him before. 

The cold tugs at her bones. It is a familiar cold, the frost and winter of her youth in a place not all that far from here. Her hands shake with the memories, with the pseudo cold of her childhood, not the snow that settles around them. 

It paints the world black and white and Nat’s never believed in that, not since she was a child with young, optimistic eyes. They pulled that from her long ago, in a winter just like this. She is weary, her bones are old, now, even if she is not. 

Clint tells her stories of his summers in Europe, the summers of a different life. Summers from before. They know SHIELD are listening, that they shouldn’t be talking about these things, but whenever they get back to base, Clint will just say ‘it was all make believe’ and they will pretend that is true.

She will think, sometimes, that it all fake. That he is a master manipulator, ready to reach into parts of her chest she signed off long ago. She will tell herself that, because the alternative is too painful. She does not love. She does not remember how. 

She wraps her hands around her body, closes her eyes. She has not been back to Russia for years. She ran as soon as she could, busied herself with targets and moles and marks. She exercised her life, cut out anything that wasn’t bloodshed and battles. She made herself tough, dressed herself up with new names and new clothes and lost all parts that weren’t cast in the mould of the Red Room.

The Natasha Romanov who remembered this childhood, who lived it - she ceased to exist. Only being here with Clint, listening to him recount taking the train across Switzerland on a passport he stole by accident, can she even bring herself to go back. 

He gives her his coat, stripping it off as the snow falls in sheets, almost blocking their view. She rejects it at first, making a fuss where one doesn’t need to be. When he drapes it around her shoulders as she shakes, it could be mistaken that it is the cold she fears - the cold that causes these tremors. But she has always been a child of nightmares and this is nothing different. 

She is scared of her past, of what her future holds for her. She is not used to feeling this way and it makes her angry, makes her blood boil under her skin. But Clint is here, he is calm and kind and smiles more than she ever has. 

He gives her his coat and it is not just the cold he saves her from.

…

Budapest, the mid 2000’s. She has lost track of the years. She is back to seeing in blood, in the red that stains the walls and the carpets. Clint stands beside her. This was the only choice, this was just a tough call. A mission gone awry, having each other’s backs. 

The gun in her hands is hot, its bullets spent. The silence is too heavy. She will remember this. Her chest heaves, denied oxygen as she plans and perfects her next move. He raises his bow, shoots off an arrow and then another. 

It is clear to her that if he hadn’t come that there would be her blood mixed in with this. She wonders why the fighting is a thrill - why the sound of her own heart pumping is soothing and dangerous in equal measure. Budapest has made her reckless. 

He says, ‘Why didn’t you call sooner?’ and she laughs instead of saying something. They have taken down an army together, just the two of them in a harmony of fists and bullets and arrows. They have slipped into one - the lines have faded, the resentment, the cool indifference is a thing of the past. 

She heads for the stairs, for fresh air to help her forget the smell of blood. She knows, already, that she won’t. It will stick to her, even after she has washed it off. It would take absolution to wipe her of these sins and by this point, she feels too far gone to care. This was business, nothing else. She will walk away and be no different. Natasha Romanov no longer needs absolution. 

She does not dwell on what would have happened if Clint hadn’t turned up. If he’d stayed on his farm with that family - with his break of regulations, with his code red. With his heart, for she thinks he has lost it somewhere between the snow and Budapest . She does not know that he has broken it up, given it to too many people, given it to her - she has no heart to give, but he does, and he chooses to lose it so it cannot be lost for him. 

But there he is, saving her with an arrow shot, his feet firmly planted by hers. They will remember Budapest - even though they think of it differently, even if they go far from this place to the skies, past the stars that fate ignored. 

‘You don’t need me anymore,’ she says without looking at him. He rests his hand on her wrist, in the inbetween of the bones so he can feel her pulse beat. 

‘I’ll always need you,’ he says. Something in her chest remembers love, then, and she wishes - perhaps - that it is a mistake for that to happen. 

Despite his words - or in spite of it, maybe - she wonders how long he can keep saving her. 

 

….

He’s taken a plea deal. They’re at an airport in England and it rains so much she thinks she might drown. They ran here what feels like an age ago but she always guessed he’d go back. She had nothing to lose and he had everything. 

There’ll be handcuffs soon, a blue jumpsuit and a goodbye she is sick of giving. He’s going back to America, to his family and house arrest and an electronic tag around his ankle. She thought about going with him - following him back across the sea for her sentence on the side of the ocean she used to call home. But she has nothing to go back for.

No, a lie. Him, maybe, but she holds no place in his life. She can fit here, a ghost in the walls, in the late night shadows. 

She throws her arms around him and holds him close. He whispers goodbyes that she wishes won’t be forever. She watches him disappear, and steps back into the darkness. 

He tells Ross’ minions that she’s in Mexico, no - wait, she’s in New Zealand now. He pinpoints her on maps all over the world. The soldiers are always too late: she’s gone because she was  
never there. 

She slips over streets in London or Glasgow, across unfamiliar landscapes. She lives in the highlands for a while, craving the space of small town Missouri, of the dusty fields around his house. It is a world away, unsurmountable. 

He sends her postcards. She never asks how he bypasses the system. She writes back: sporadic, nomadic, nondescript. She is neither here nor there. His children send things too, packages and parcels and notes about how boring school is. Their normalcy, their nonchalant childishness, is a godsend. 

She goes from place to place, slipping into different identity with ease, but they are stable, they are always there. They are stories of Clint, stuck inside, going crazy, shooting arrows in the attic to keep his eye in. 

He writes to her of his summers, of those crazy days before the world was ending around them. She reads, still does not know if they are real. But she believes in him now, she has to. 

He is a calm in her chaos, he always has been. He throws the government off her tail, keeps her sane with tales from a life she has never even dreamt of having. He is a north star, a constant, a home to aim for, one day. He saves her, just by being him. 

…

And then, this. 

Dark skies, a distant red sun burning low on the horizon. Stumbling over rocks while snow falls. It reminds her of Russia but she does not wish to think of that. Red skulls, burned deep, a truth spoken that cannot be taken back. The world is still ending, but this time she can do something about it. 

She rests her forehead against his, their fingers falling together and then apart. A soul for a soul. It is simple, really. He has her heart and she his. It is love that kills her - not bullets and anger or blinding violence.  
It is love, for him, for all those they have lost - for the family she found, the family that she has to save. It is her turn, finally. 

He slams her body against the ground, but she has already calculated a defence. They move in time, just like in Budapest - her blow, his, then reset. But in this fight there is no common goal; the enemy is time now Thanos is gone. They are adversaries, slipping ever closer to the edge. 

She holds his fingers in hers, intertwined, suspended over the darkness that calls to her. She has no one, he has everyone. She will save the world with her last breath because she is sick of destroying it. 

There is no coat for the cold, no plea deal, no different call. They are done with the taking, the giving - this is bigger than her, than the both of them. You have to lose that which you love - just a shame that is her, after everything. But she is choosing this, her chance. He cannot save her this time. 

‘Let me go,’ she says. 

He is pleading with her. There is too much she wanted to say, but no time. That’s gone, now, this is all that’s left. 

‘It’s going to be okay,’ she says. And then she is falling. She closes her eyes. 

The stars have settled now, the red sun blazing down on them. This, she supposes, is how it was supposed to end. There is one way this goes right, one chance. This is her sacrifice, this is her save. This is her, silhouetted against the sun, looking up at him. 

And so this is how it ends.

**Author's Note:**

> Watched Endgame for the second time - this is what happened. Also, not 100% sure that the dialogue from Vormir in Endgame is correct but I have a terrible memory and it's the best I could do.


End file.
